


A Bird on the Wing

by lillypillylies



Category: Leverage
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Kid Fic, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-26
Updated: 2015-02-26
Packaged: 2018-03-15 09:11:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3441587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lillypillylies/pseuds/lillypillylies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>There's never been a more terrifying person on the planet than this little girl.</i>
</p><p>Nate deals with the conflict of being a father again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Bird on the Wing

A shrill cry pierces the night, and Nate startles awake out of a deep sleep. Beside him, Sophie stirs with a groan and he blindly gropes for her shoulder to give a reassuring pat.

"My turn," he mumbles, already pushing himself up. Sophie rolls over without protest and pulls the covers over her head while he makes the weary trek across the hall to the baby's room.

She finds him there an hour later and leans heavily against his side as she joins him looking down into the crib. After a minute she rubs his arm and turns away to switch off the lamp. "She's fine. Come back to bed."

It started the first few days after they brought her home. Nate held his newborn daughter and stared down at her in wonder, in amazement, and impossibly in love - much like any new father would, much like he had once looked at another child, many years and another lifetime ago.

Emily Ford: 3.9 kilograms, almost completely bald, tiny, wrinkled hands with the powerful grip of a master thief in the making - or so Parker notes approvingly when the team descends on their London home shortly after the birth. Everyone agrees that she'll be scaling skyscrapers in no time. 

Everyone except Nate, who sincerely hopes Emily never scales any building of any height. But he concedes any child born to such parents as he and Sophie can't be expected to lead a perfectly normal life. So he'll just plan to keep extreme risk-taking behaviours to a minimum for as long as he can.

She's perfect, his daughter. And he can't stop staring at her. Which might not seem so strange - perhaps a parent's natural urge to confirm the presence of all ten fingers and toes and imprint every detail of this small, helpless creature firmly in his mind. But there's more to it than that for him.

He doesn't even realise what he's doing, at first. Those first weeks pass in a blur and it takes time for him to acknowledge to himself just what it is, exactly, that he's looking for when he stares sometimes so intently.

Sophie, even exhausted with feedings and too little sleep and adapting to motherhood, notices before long. She thinks he's scared - of being a father, of losing another child, of failing another child.

And, well, he is.

There's never been a more terrifying person on the planet than this little girl.

But that's not what draws him back to her crib night after night, to stand over her and watch her tiny, slumbering form.

Weeks and months pass. She gets bigger and brighter and bolder every day and his fears fade, little by little, drowned out by the never-ending joys and trials and plain old routine of parenthood. 

And as their daughter grows and changes, their marriage stretches and resettles around the stranger in their midst. Her presence binds them, him and Sophie, tighter than vows ever could, while providing them with ever new and interesting reasons to argue on a daily basis.

Who let her climb on the sofa with sticky jam hands (he did). Who misplaced her favourite teething ring (she did). Is 9 months really old enough to be teaching her to play chess ( _yes_ \- according to him). Is it really necessary she learn to speak French before English ( _yes_ \- according to her). Whose turn is it to change her ( _yours_ \- according to them both).

It still happens at odd moments; he finds himself drawn back into the old habit. Each milestone that passes renews that urge to look at her with assessing eyes, searching her face, following her mannerisms, cataloguing her behaviour.

He looks and looks, waiting for the first glimpse of recognition, but it never comes. 

No matter how closely he inspects his daughter's features, he never sees any sign of Sam in her.

She's all Sophie, from her big brown eyes to her sweet smile; her nose, her chin, the soft wisps of her dark hair - far too fine and smooth to have come from the Ford gene pool - she is her mother's daughter.

It's a relief. Honestly, it's a relief. He doesn't want to see his son looking back at him from another child's face. The constant reminder would be too much and never enough and he doesn't want his bottomless grief affecting Emily's life any more than it has to. She deserves better, and when he looks at her and sees Sophie, all he feels is love.

But, perhaps due to that vein of Irish Catholic masochism that runs so deeply through him, he keeps looking, anyway.

Sophie finds him at the table one day, a sippy-cup held aloft and motionless while an impatient toddler bangs her fists on her high-chair tray. He's supposed to be supervising lunch but he's caught, frozen, trying to remember if Sam ever made as much mess with a banana as Emily does almost daily - it's in her hair, on the floor, on _both_ their clothes somehow - seriously, how did she even manage that?

Sophie tuts and reaches over to pluck the red plastic cup from his grasp, delivering it to the waiting pair of banana-covered hands, and the banging promptly stops.

"You're doing it again," Sophie says, leaning her hip against the back of his chair.

A minute or an hour might pass as he sits and stares, unable to respond, still caught, mind still racing.

"Papa, plus de lait Papa, Papa-Papa-Papa, plus de lait Papa," Emily says, upgrading this time from banging fists to banging her cup instead.

He looks between them: his noisy child, his forbearing wife.

"I can't remember," he says, his voice breaking. 

It's been almost 20 years since Sam was this age, babbling at him from his high-chair, and there are moments from those days he will never, could never forget - first steps, first birthday, the first time he came home and Sam held out his arms saying 'dada' - moments irrevocably burned into his mind. But the little things, those trivial details and mundane moments that pass by without fanfare, those memories have faded. They started to fade a long time ago and he never even noticed.

It's devastating to realise he can't remember if Sam liked pears or bananas better as a baby. He should remember that. He should remember everything, because who will if not him?

Sophie, proving once again that she always knows what's going on with him, sometimes even before he does, simply says, "You should talk to Maggie."

And because at some point he started actually listening to what Sophie says - a habit, once developed, that has proved very difficult to break - he does.

Maggie sends him pictures.

Hundreds of them. Ever the curator, she has kept them all safe and meticulously organised, with digital copies stored in multiple locations for added security, like the precious artefacts they are. Nate hasn't seen any of them in a long time.

Sophie puts Emily to bed that night and then pours him a drink. She would leave him alone if he asked, but when she brings the whiskey over he catches her hand and pulls her down next to him on the sofa, the laptop open on the coffee table before them.

She lays an arm over his back, leaning into his side as he hunches forward in sickening anticipation, at once dreading and yearning for the flood of memories and pain to come. 

It's like plunging into a fountain after walking for years in the desert. Image after image of everything he lost waking up that parched, barren territory of his heart where Sam used to live. It's exactly as difficult as he expected, but he forces himself to stay and look at every picture as it appears on the screen, because he needs to see. He has to know. 

He talks through it all because it's easier to keep it together this way, providing context for Sophie and answering her murmured questions. Once they reach the pictures chronicling Sam's second year, the same age as his little sister is now, Nate can't ignore the confirmation of what he already knew. No fading, rose-coloured memories these; the proof is right in front of him in stark HD clarity.

"Sam looked nothing like Emily."

"Hmm."

Sophie's non-committal reply is like a red flag. "What?"

"Well, I mean, no, they're not very similar. They both look like you, though, don't they?"

For the first time he tears his eyes from the screen and stares at her. 

She smiles crookedly. "I know you think she looks more like me but come on, you can't miss the resemblance." She reaches out to pause the slideshow on an image of Sam taken at the beach when he had just turned 2. He's grinning and sand-coated, proudly holding up a pile of reeking seaweed as big as he is.

Nate chuckles, distracted momentarily as the memory returns: Maggie freaking when, right after the photo had been taken, Sam had run to his mother and dropped the seaweed in her lap.

"He's got your eyes," Sophie says, bumping his shoulder with hers. "And oh, look at that boy smile. That's your smile."

"Emily has your smile."

"I know, but she has your ears, fortunately for her, and she has your cheekbones. And that face she makes when she's cranky, or being, you know, particularly stubborn - oh, that's all you, darling."

He gives her a look but doesn't respond, instead choosing to browse through some more photos. Sam is older now, less a baby and more the outgoing boy he was in the years before he became ill.

"Look," Sophie laughs suddenly, "that's it right there. That's your difficult face. Emily does it all the time, too."

It's Sam's fourth birthday party. Sam had thrown a sugar-fuelled tantrum at one point and earned himself a time-out. Nate remembers surreptitiously snapping this picture of the little boy banished to the stairs, sitting mutinously with his arms crossed, a sparkly green birthday hat perched on his head. And beneath the hat -

"I don't make that face," he says.

"You're doing it right now."

"I - no I'm not."

"Want me to take a picture?"

He puts his arm around her, pulling her back into his side. "I want you to stay with me and admire my son."

She leans her head against his shoulder, and stays until he can't any longer.

Only a few days later, he finds himself spending a good twenty minutes persuading a toddler that she really does need to put her shoes on if she wants to go out with Papa. Sophie's at the theatre and it's the nanny's day off and he admits, if only privately, that both women are much better at dealing with these kinds of situations than he is.

Sophie says it's because he tries to employ logic and reason with Emily, when young children are all id and have no use for such things. He thinks that this is underestimating Emily's capacity for rationality. She obviously has a decent grasp of cause and effect, since she figured out pretty quick the way screaming at a particular register will make Sophie give her whatever she wants 9 times out of 10 just to shut her up.

This has, of course, become one of their more persistent running arguments, and he's pretty sure he still hasn't felt the full repercussions of implying that Sophie spoils Emily. Even though he's right about that; she totally does.

None of which helps with his current situation.

"It's too cold and wet outside to go out with bare feet," he explains patiently. He's on the floor in the foyer, peering under the hall table where Emily is crouched, refusing to come out.

"Non!"

"Well it is cold, honey."

"Non!" 

"Well no, it is, because we live in England and the weather is terrible here. You could run around barefoot all you wanted if we lived somewhere with a decent climate but, well, take that up with your mother. Good luck. I'm pretty sure this is payback for Portland." He sighs and gets back on track, grabbing a shoe at random from the selection of rejects that has piled up beside him. "Come on, what about your purple sneakers, you love the purple ones, right?"

Predictably, the answer is no. On the verge of giving up, he lets himself collapse on his back, lying splayed out in the middle of the rug with the tiny purple shoe perched on his chest. Out of the corner of his eye he notes when she crawls out from under the table and stretches out on her tummy a few feet away, legs kicking idly as she pretends to ignore him. He doesn't trust this small victory, she's still exuding defiance with that look on her face that yes, now it's been pointed out to him, is maybe a little familiar.

"Seriously, what's the deal with the shoes, huh?"

"Pas de chaussures, Papa," she responds without skipping a beat, though with her slightly garbled pronunciation and bastardised blend of French/English vocabulary it comes out more like 'pas de shoe-shoes'. 

Now, he would like to think himself at least as stubborn as any toddler, but he knows when he's beat. He's not going to get to run any errands today. He'll just have to call Sophie to have her pick up the milk and a few other necessities on her way home - something which she, inexplicably, hates doing, though will never say why.

"Well, we all make concessions, don't we? Non?" She's actually ignoring him now, blowing raspberries into the rug, and he laughs. "Okay, you know what, let's go take a nap on the couch."

She squeals when he swoops over and snatches her up, but graciously allows herself to be carried off to a more appropriate place for repose than the floor by the front door.

She falls asleep draped over his chest, any remaining hint of that mulish expression erased as her features go slack, dead to world in moments in that enviable way of young children.

He never thought one of his less flattering traits would be the thing he passed on to both his children. But the pictures don't lie and he remembers now, seeing the same look on Sam's face when he didn't want to take a bath, or refused to eat his broccoli, digging his heels in to the point where Maggie would throw her hands up and declare, "He's your son, you do something with him!"

It makes him downright proud all of a sudden. He hopes Emily carries it with her all of her days - this thing that connects the three of them together, father, son, and daughter. 

And after all, there are worse things a child could inherit from Nathan Ford.


End file.
